Max Havelaar (Siebenhaar)/Chapter 10
Although I spare no one when principles are at stake, yet it is obvious that with Stern I must adopt a different course from the one I have taken with Frits, and as it must be anticipated that my name—the firm is Last & Co., but my name is Drystubble: Batavus Drystubble—will be connected with a book containing matters which are not in accord with the respect that every decent man and broker owes to himself, I deem it my duty to inform you how I have endeavoured to bring this Stern back to the right way.
I have not spoken to him of the Lord—for he is a Lutheran—but I have made an appeal to his heart and his honour. Just see how I have managed it, and you may note how much we can do with a knowledge of men. I have heard him say: “On my word of honour,” and I asked him what he meant by that.
“Well,” he said, “that I pledge my honour for the truth of what I say.”
“That’s a good deal,” I went on. “Are you so sure that you always speak the truth?”
“Yes,” he declared, “from the truth I never swerve. When my breast glows . . .”
The reader knows the rest.
“That certainly is very fine,” I said, and I looked quite innocent, as though I believed it.
But this is just where I had set a clever trap for him, with the object—without risking the danger of seeing old Stern fall into the hands of Busselinck & Waterman—the object of putting this young brat in his proper place for once, and making him feel the enormous distance there is between an absolute beginner—even if his father does do business on a large scale—and a broker who has been on ’Change for twenty years.
I must tell you that I knew he had learnt by heart—he says “outwardly”—all sorts of verse-trash, and as verses always contain lies, I was sure that sooner or later I should catch him in an untruth. Nor was it long before I did. I was sitting in the morning-room, and he was in the drawing-room . . . for we have a drawing-room. Mary was knitting, and he was just going to tell her something. I listened attentively, and when he had finished, I asked him whether he had the book from which he had read the thing he had just droned. He said yes, and brought it to me. It was a part of the works of a man named Heine. The day after I gave him—I mean Stern—the following:
Reflections on the love of truth in a person who recites
the subjoined trash of Heine's to a young girl who is knitting
in the drawing-room.
Heart’s love, and bear thee afar,
Heart’s love? Mary, your Heart’s love? Do your old people know of that, and Louisa Rosemeyer? Is it decent to say this to a child that quite readily may become disobedient to her mother through it, as she may take it into her head that she is of age, when someone calls her Heart’s love? What does it mean: bearing her on wings? You have no wings, and your song hasn’t either. Just try to cross the Laurier Canal, which isn’t even very wide. But even if you had wings, are you at liberty to propose such things to a young girl who has not yet been confirmed? And even if the child were a full member of the Church, what is the meaning of that offer to fly away together? Fie!
And valleys enchanted are.
Then why don’t you go there alone and hire a flat? but don’t take a young girl with you whose duty it is to help her mother in the household! But you don’t really mean it! First of all you have never seen the Ganges, and so you cannot know whether it is nice living there. Shall I just tell you how matters stand? It’s all lies, which you only tell for the one reason that in this whole versification you make yourself the slave of metre and rhyme. If the first line had ended in ham, scone, guava, there would have been no Ganges to flow swiftly, but you would have asked Mary whether she would have come with you to Schiedam, Toulon, Java, and so on. So you see that the proposed route of your journey was not meant seriously or sincerely, and that the whole affair resolves itself into a silly singsong of words without sense or object. What would happen, do you think, if Mary just took it into her head to want to make that mad journey? I am not even now speaking of the uncomfortable mode of travelling you suggest! But she is, thank Heaven, too sensible to long for a country about which you say:
Beneath the silent moon;
The lotus pensively listens:
Dear sister is coming soon!
The violets starward gazing,
Are lisping and laughing content,
The roses tell secrets amazing,
And fairy-tales sweet as their scent.
What would you want to do with Mary in that garden by moonlight, Stern? Is that moral, is it decent, is it respectable? Do you wish me to have to be ashamed of myself, like Busselinck & Waterman, with whom no self-respecting firm wants to have anything to do, because their daughter has run away, and because they are tricksters? What should I be compelled to answer, if they were to ask me on ’Change why my daughter stayed in that red garden such a long time? For surely you understand that no one would believe me if I said that she had to be there to pay a visit to the lotus-flowers, which, as you say, have already expected her a long time. And in the same way every sane person would laugh at me if I were foolish enough to say: Mary is in that red garden over there—why, by the way, red, and not yellow, or mauve?—to listen to the chattering and giggling of the violets or to the fairy-tales which the roses are secretly pouring into each other’s ears. Even if such a thing could be true, what good would it be to Mary, if after all it happens so secretly that she wouldn’t understand a word of it? But it’s all lies, silly lies! And not even pretty ones, for you just take a pencil and draw a rose with an ear, and see what it looks like! And what does it mean that those fairy-tales are so like scent? Shall I just tell you in good round Dutch? It means that there is a bad odour about those silly fairy-tales . . . that’s what it is!
With sage, devout eyes agleam,
And murmurs afar sonorous
The wave of the sacred stream.
There softly, so softly sinking
Where palm-trees rustle above,
Dreamlike we shall be drinking
The peace and rapture of love.
Cannot you go to Artis[1]—you have written to your father that I am a member, haven’t you?—now think, can you not be suited in Artis, if you want to see strange animals at any price? Must it be absolutely those gazelles on the Ganges, which in any case you can never observe so well in their wild state as in a neat enclosure of coal-tarred iron? Why do you call those animals devout and sage! The latter description may pass—they, at any rate, don’t make such absurd verses—but devout! What does it mean? Isn’t it abusing a sacred expression that should only be used for people of the true faith? And that sacred stream? Are you justified in telling Mary things that will make her a heathen? Are you justified in shaking her in the conviction that there is no holy water but that of baptism, and no sacred river but Jordan? Isn’t this sapping the foundations of morality, virtue, religion, Christianity, and respectability?
I want you to ponder all this, Stern! Your father is an honourable firm, and I feel sure that he approves of my appealing in this way to your better feelings, also that he prefers to do business with a man who stands for virtue and religion. Yes, principles are sacred to me, and I have no hesitation in saying frankly what I mean. So you needn’t make any secret of what I am saying to you, you may freely write to your father that you are here with a reliable family, and that I am thus showing you the way of righteousness. And you may safely ask yourself what would have become of you if you had fallen into the hands of Busselinck & Waterman. There also you would have recited such verses, but there no one would have tried to influence you, for they are tricksters. You may freely write this to your father, for when principles are at stake I spare no one. There the girls would have gone along with you to the Ganges, and then you would probably now be lying there under that tree in the wet grass, whilst now, as I have given you such paternal warning, you may remain with us in a respectable house. Write all this to your father, and tell him how grateful you are that you have come to us, and that I look after you so well, and that the daughter of Busselinck & Waterman has run away, and give him my kind regards, and tell him that I will drop another 1/16 per cent discount below their offer, as I can bear no scabs, who would steal the bread out of their rival’s mouth by more favourable conditions.
And do please me, when you give the readings from Shawlman’s parcel, by bringing in a little more solid matter. I have seen quotes in it with regard to the coffee-culture, for the past twenty years, from all the Residencies of Java: read a little of that kind of thing! You see, then the Rosemeyers, who are in sugar, may hear a little of what really goes on in the world. And also you must not make out that the girls and all of us are cannibals that have swallowed something of yours . . . that’s not respectable, my dear boy. Do believe a man who surely knows what goes on in the world! I have served your father from before his birth—I mean his firm, no . . . our firm, I mean: Last & Co.—formerly it was Last & Meyer, but the Meyers have been out of it a long time—so you will understand that I have the best intentions towards you. And do urge Frits to behave better, and don’t teach him to write verses, and pretend not to see it when he makes faces at the bookkeeper, and all that sort of thing. Set him a good example, as you are so much older, and try to inculcate composure and the stately manner of a fine gentleman in him, for he must become a broker.
I am your paternal friend,
Batavus Drystubble,
(Firm, Last & Co., coffee-brokers.)
Laurier Canal, No. 37.
- ↑ The zoological gardens in Amsterdam.